William McGivern - A Matter of Honor

“He’d never seen you before,” Laura Devers said. “He must have wondered why you didn’t go to your own doctor.”

“I didn’t want to wait,” Caidin said. “I felt I wanted to know before I saw Duro again.”

“Did you tell him you had a doctor’s appointment?”

Caidin shook her head. “No, I haven’t even talked to him. I asked Sergeant Gordon to tell him to do whatever he had to do, square himself away with the Army and the police before he got in touch with me. But I did hear his voice. I listened in when he was calling from Frankfurt.” She laughed softly. “He didn’t ask for me. I’m not even sure he plans to call...”

“Would you like to have the baby?”

“I don’t know,” Bonnie Caidin said. “I’m not sure I want to love anything for a while. Right now I can’t be sure what’s truth and what’s fantasy. Sometimes I think I just imagined the past... my brothers, Mark and even Duro.”

It was dusk and lights from the Weir farmhouse laid flat squares of yellow on the gravel driveway when they reached the front door. Laura declined the invitation to come in for a drink.

“To tell you the truth, Bonnie, I want to go home and write a letter to Scotty. I feel better about him when I stay in touch.”

“But you told me you called the hospital twice.”

“Three times, actually, but I just get to talk to the floor orderly. He tells me Scotty’s doing just fine, seeing no one except his doctors. You’d think at my age I could make up my mind,” she said, “but I’ve been arguing with myself whether or not I should fly over to Frankfurt. Or at least fly over to bring him home when he’s fit.”

“Why don’t you? I think he’d love that.”

“And then again he might not,” Laura said. “We’re old, old friends, and good friends, and I know how I feel about him, but he’s stubborn, you know. I wouldn’t want to rile him. I’ve got a hunch Scotty Weir’d rather find his own way home.”

“There’s a number for you to call in Chicago, Miss Bonnie. It’s Sergeant Gordon. He tried to reach you three times. Can I bring you a pot of tea? You haven’t eaten a bite today.”

“Tea would be just fine,” she said. “Tea with lots of sugar and dry toast.”

Grimes hesitated and the skin above his collar flushed red as he spoke. “You’ll forgive me, Miss Bonnie, but is it Mark’s boy you’re carrying?”

“No, Grimes,” she said, “it isn’t. That just wasn’t meant to be, Mark and I.”

“The general would’ve been pleased,” the man said. “We’d have made a fine pair of grandfathers, don’t you think? Jesus, we’d have carried on...”

Bonnie Caidin sat at the general’s desk and picked up the phone pad with Grimes’ writing on it.

Gordon answered at once in a voice so booming, so vibrant that she said, “Doobie, what is it? Have you been drinking?”

“Drinking, hell, Bonnie. I’m just on one big success high. When you get to the bottom of a case as deep and rotten as this one, it’s like sniffing pure oxygen. Get your pencil ready, lady.”

“Doobie,” she said, “I’m off duty. I haven’t even called the office since Grimes drove me down here.”

“Don’t give me that, Bonnie. You’re too pro to turn down a byline on something like this. The whole city is upside down, I’ve had a hard time protecting it for you, but remember, Mark said this would be your story.”

“All right,” Caidin said. “I’ve got a pencil and paper here. Shoot, Doobie.”

“There’s been a lot of coverage, but what I’m giving you is the nuts and bolts, the inside stuff on how we put the case together, the information the other papers don’t have yet. And a lot of credit goes to your boy friend.”

“Don’t call him that, please,” she said and scrawled “Durham Lasari” across the top of the page. “Start with the Chicago end.”

“Okay. We’d been working round the clock, we didn’t know exactly what we were looking for, but we were looking. There were shadows, we were getting an outline. It was part coincidence, part self-indictment, but last Friday we finally threw a net over Detective Frank Salmi, one of the city’s own finest, the bastard, and he broke down and gave us some very pertinent details.”

Grimes came in and set a tray of tea things on the desk. Bonnie Caidin blew him a kiss and said into the phone, “How’d you do it?”

“The damndest thing, Bonnie. We had that voice tape and the man’s voice we couldn’t identify on it, right? Well, by chance I was on the elevators in the police building, on my way up to the office, sharing the ride with some civilian cats, and on the third floor Salmi gets on. Remember, Bonnie, how in those elevators, right over the regular floor number, there’s a little brass plaque with the numbers in braille? It’s the same in all the county buildings.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Well, Salmi sees me, nods hello and then he goes apeshit, puts on some kind of clown act, feeling those braille number plates, making cracks about Lady Justice being blind. He got a couple of laughs from the civilians and then he turned to me and said, ‘I’d like to ask you for lunch today, Sergeant, but my wife sewed razor blades in my pockets. She don’t want me bribing no cops.’ Another big laugh, he’s a real elevator comedian, his nerves just cracked on him.

“Salmi’s a short guy, you know, balding, tan complexion, and I saw that he was sweating like a greaseball. All of a sudden I knew why. That was his voice on the tapes and the fucker was so nervous being in the same car with me that he couldn’t keep still, he had to expose himself.

“So at the next floor I asked all the civilians to step out. Frank and I took a ride up a couple more floors and I pressed the emergency button to stop the cab between floors. I pulled the door open just a little to show him we were all alone between four brick walls. We had our chat. I never laid a hand on him, Bonnie, but in five minutes he was blubbering to get up to Commissioner McDade’s office and give his story to a steno.”

“Okay, Doobie,” she said, “you talk fast but I’ve got that.”

“Salmi told us what we’d suspected all along but could never prove. It was a heroin scam on both sides of the Atlantic, using military couriers, a growing business. They were expecting their fifth delivery.”

“Just a minute,” she said, and then asked a few questions to clarify details on the earlier deliveries. “All right, I’m clear so far. Where was Sergeant Malleck during all this?”

“Right where he should be, running his operation from the armory. We decided our best strategy was to simulate business as usual. Let Lasari try to get through to the armory with the payload and catch Malleck with the goods in his hands.”

“And Detective Salmi?”

“We kept him on ice, so to speak. Once he started talking he didn’t want to stop. He knew he was an accessory to Murder One for setting up Mark with that phone call, though he’s pleading against collusion. He insists he didn’t know an execution was planned.

“It was two of Malleck’s men, Eddie Neal and Joe Castana, who pulled the trigger. We got them both right at the airport, along with that amateur gunsel Mr. M. sent over to pick up the shit for himself.”

“Mr. M.? I thought he was straight syndicate.”

“I guess he wanted something on the side. According to Salmi, Mr. M. bankrolled the operation for Malleck from the beginning. It was going to be comparatively small stuff, but profitable enough for both sides. But Malleck got greedy and careless.

“The first couriers brought in duffels with only three to four pounds of white in the lining. Malleck figured out a new angle for a profit to split between himself and a Sergeant Strasser in Germany. Before leaving Germany, each courier would mail home one or more regulation GI packages, little things, a teddy bear, a fancy pillow, a music box — each with its cache of heroin inside. There’s no limit as to how many packages a GI can send as long as they’re no heavier than seventy pounds maximum and are marked gift with a declared value under fifty dollars. He can take his choice, the German post office or APO, which is a little cheaper. Malleck wasn’t worried about costs, and he was bypassing Mr. M. completely on this extra loot.”